European and Islamic Contributions to an Anthropocentric Qur’anic Hermeneutic

Mehdi Azaiez and the staff of Beit al Hikma (Académie Tunisienne des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts) put on a stimulating conference in Beit al Hikma’s beautiful home in Carthage, right on the Mediterranean. Over the course of three days (July 4-6, 2017) a full-throated debate played out, in three languages, over the context within which the Qur’an ought to be read. My own contribution traced the main currents of European philosophy and Islamic thought that made their way into one Indonesian thinker’s call for an anthropocentric reading of the Qur’an:

The slides from my presentation, which trace the connections between thinkers across a world map, are available here. The text of the paper is still too rough to post here, but I plan to turn it into an article within the next year.